Cameron chose to delegate the investigation into the May-Gove bustup to Sir
Jeremy Heywood rather than decide for himself

How typical of Michael Gove. In the midst of the most dangerous battle he has yet fought with a Cabinet colleague – a career-defining moment, some would say – he might have been tempted to rein in his rhetoric, to seek refuge beneath the parapet and to stick to platitudes until the storm of his row with Theresa May had safely passed.

Instead, the speech he delivered yesterday at Policy Exchange, the think tank he co-founded, was one of the most personal, emotionally charged and intellectually ferocious he has ever given. “Believe me,” he declared, “I know what real barriers to success look like… And I know what setting children up to fail looks like.” Pledging to end illiteracy and innumeracy, he identified autonomy and accountability as the dual forces that would drive change. Citing a remark made to him by Barack Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, he then advanced to the heart of the matter: “What matters in our school system is not what adults want but what children need.”

That, of course, is the problem. It is the grown-ups who have been misbehaving: Michael’s gang dissing Theresa’s gang, and vice versa. Who’s tougher, who’s going out with whom, breathless inventories of angry questions, late-night spats on social media, Micky “Pollard” Gove’s beef with the Home Secretary (“Am I bovvered?”): it has been the politics of the upper deck of the bus. It would all be hilarious and ephemeral were the substance of the row – Islamic extremism – not so deadly serious.

Yesterday evening, Gove apologised to the Prime Minister and to Charles Farr, the official he had criticised by name. The present row was triggered by remarks made by the Education Secretary during a visit to The Times, and his complaint was that the Home Office had been insufficiently tough in addressing extremist Muslim groups that might not be identifiably violent themselves, but nurtured future acts of aggression and ushered potential jihadis towards the terrorist milieu. May’s team retaliated with brutal speed, publishing a routine ministerial letter into which had been stitched a series of seriously aggressive questions related to the so-called “Trojan Horse” saga and the alleged campaign of Islamist entryism afflicting Birmingham’s secular state schools. To give you a flavour: “How did it come to pass, for example, that one of the governors at Park View [school] was the chairman of the education committee of the Muslim Council of Britain? Is it true that Birmingham city council was warned about these allegations in 2008? Is it true that the Department for Education was warned in 2010? If so, why did nobody act?” This is the quick-fire language of a hostile press conference, not a civilised exchange between colleagues on the eve of the Ofsted report into the schools – due to be published tomorrow.

The extraordinary outcome was that the Prime Minister has deputed Sir Jeremy Heywood, the ubiquitous Cabinet Secretary, to investigate the May-Gove bust-up. Last seen co-ordinating HMG’s response to the Pfizer bid for AstraZeneca, Sir Jeremy was now tasked to act as referee between two Cabinet ministers – a role he has performed in private on many occasions. This, I think, is the first time he has done so in public.

The episode is extraordinary for all sorts of reasons, not least because it involves blue-on-blue conflict. “You have to ask,” as one source puts it, “how the most polite politician in the Western world ended up at war with the dullest.”

Gove’s mistake at The Times, as he has since acknowledged to friends, was to criticise by name Farr, who runs the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) within the Home Office. To make matters worse, Farr is in a relationship with Fiona Cunningham, one of the Home Secretary’s two extremely effective special advisers (the other is Nick Timothy). Cunningham has now resigned. But before her departure, she and Timothy helped to transform May from an accidental Home Secretary, who was pencilled-in for the job by David Cameron and George Osborne only days before the 2010 election (not least to address the embarrassing gender imbalance at the apex of the Coalition) into a serious contender for the top job. Gove picked a bad moment to pick a fight with May, who last week pulled 12 points clear of Boris Johnson as Tory members’ choice as the next party leader in a poll conducted by the ConservativeHome website.

To grasp what an astonishing turnaround this is, remember that this is the same woman who told the Conservatives at their annual conference that some people thought of them as the “nasty party”. In 2002, it seemed as if she would never be forgiven that (entirely accurate) observation about public perceptions. Twelve years on, her position in the tribe is radically different – though it is no secret that Gove doubts her credentials as a leadership contender and has made this clear in Cabinet.

All of which matters a lot less than the security of the nation. “I am here to tell you that it’s time to face up to reality,” the Home Secretary told the Police Federation last month. In which spirit – whatever errors of political etiquette were made by both sides last week, it needs to be said that, on the question of Islamic extremism, Gove is right: to deal with this threat, traditional counter-terrorist strategies are necessary but nowhere near sufficient.

True, the Government has reached a nervous consensus on the matter, reflected in the findings last December of the Extremism Taskforce. This body was established after the shocking murder of Drummer Lee Rigby and concluded – in its report, at least – that the Government’s decision had to be “broader than dealing only with those who espouse violence – we must confront the poisonous extremist ideology that can lead people to violence; which divides communities and which extremists use to recruit individuals to their cause”.

But is this really the Home Office view? At one tense meeting of the taskforce in November, matters came to a head and it became clear that there were still sharp differences between May and Gove. In the words of one present: “Theresa, loyal to her officials as ever, was not comfortable with tackling extremism very far 'upstream’ ” – jargon for groups that are not themselves involved in violence or agitation.

It would be preposterous to suggest that May is soft on terrorism – consider the lengths to which she went to deport Abu Qatada. But her instincts on Islamic extremism are insufficiently sharp. The Home Secretary recoils from the radicalism that the problem requires and will require for decades to come. It is no accident that this issue, of all issues, should have produced the first officially acknowledged split between Conservatives in this government (I exclude the jovial Ken Clarke from this calculation). How a modern liberal democracy deals with fundamentalist extremism is much more than a “neo-con” fixation. Nor is it an offshoot of Islamophobia. It is an argument about liberty, security and the coexistence of the two.

I realise that the possible involvement of special advisers meant that the PM had to delegate this investigation to Heywood. But I wish he had not done so with quite such alacrity. Cameron likes Gove more than May; but he is more like May than Gove. In this case, we needed to see him decide between the two and what they, respectively, believe. Instead, like Pilate, he walked away, drying his hands.